Basically, we had a two-hour meeting where we both came to the same exact solution to how to do the show, which was it had to have a lot of characters, the characters had to be really mysterious and the island itself had to be even more mysterious than they were.

I think that 'The Shield' was a phenomenal series finale.

A lot of writers whom I love, admire and call friends share this feeling, which is this fundamental idea that we're frauds. That we will be pushed out on to the stage, and it will be revealed that the emperor has no clothes.

Whenever we do a story or we show the monster or we find the hatch, that all has to be consistent with what we know the ending to be. We have a goal that we are working towards.

We obviously come up with these ideas based on the storytelling, what's cool to us. But then our masters will provide us with resources to do this stuff if there's a potential revenue stream down the line. So we're scratching each other's backs.

I always get frustrated with movies and television shows that cheat. For example, if our season premiere started with those guys washing up on the beach? I would be like, wait a minute. Those guys were about 10 miles offshore. How did they get to the beach? I don't want to cheat.